So I knew who the listener in the house was, after Mrs. Garr was dead.
Mr. Waller and Mr. Kistler got a big hand for their capture of Buffingham, and Mr. Waller was given an extra play for his discovery of the talkative bank guard. There were all sorts of pictures: the house, the one remaining picture of Mrs. Garr—the one I’d seen at the railroad station—Charles Buffingham, Reginald Buffingham, even the black scarf Buffingham had tied over his face.
The papers finally had the story they’d been cheated out of at first.
But reading, you could see the accounts were incomplete. That was when the rumors began to spread. People began wondering about why the police hadn’t known Mrs. Garr was murdered. Interest was whipped up as promises were made of sensational disclosures at the trial.
On my ninth day in the hospital, the trial and the newspaper accounts all ended with a bang and a whimper.
Mr. Buffingham hanged himself in his cell.
—
MISS SANDS CAME IN to see me one evening. I was glad; you can gossip with a woman so much more thoroughly than with a man, and she knew the facts. I’d had to be careful with the girls from the offices.
She seemed pathetically glad because I enjoyed her coming; after the first time, she came every night. She told me Lieutenant Strom had called Mr. Waller in to see him, and after hemming and hawing around said they were taking on a new group of substitutes, and he had been agreeably impressed with Mr. Waller’s work on the bank guard. Then he gave him back his two-thousand-dollar note, and Waller tore it into bits and threw it into Strom’s wastebasket and walked home with a job. Miss Sands said he went home and cried.
Lieutenant Strom sent flowers but didn’t come himself. I wondered what that meant.
The Wallers didn’t come, but Mrs. Halloran did. She’d bought herself a forty-dollar black satin dress, the very first of the fall preshowings; she sweated in it proudly all the hot afternoon she visited me.
“My, you’ll hardly know the place when you get back,” she said. “We got men stuccoing the outside now. Pale green, we decided on. My, it’s going to look swell. We’re going to raise all the rents.”
“You’ll want richer people than me, then. This hospital is cleaning me out.”
I was willing to move now.
“Why, I wouldn’t think of asking you to move, Mrs. Dacres, in your condition and all, but if you could see your way around to, it would be lovely, just lovely.” She paused, hinted. “Wasn’t it around this time of week you used to pay?”
Hodge had brought my handbag down, with necessities.
I paid her eight dollars for two weeks.
“I’ll be very sorry to lose you, Mrs. Dacres, such prompt pay and all, but that’s the way it is, some go up in the world, and some go down.”
“You’re still going up nicely?”
“Oh my, yes.” She leaned forward confidentially. “You know that money? All that money you found? We got in touch with some swell lawyers; they come around to see us when the story come out in the papers. They said it was a shame, the way we were the only relatives and all, we shouldn’t get the money. They said we had a swell case, in view. In view, you know. They don’t think the people who are supposed to start that dog and cat house will fight very hard. And then we’ll get all that money! My! Forty thousand dollars! I cer’n’y never knew my aunt Hattie had that much money, the way she lived and all.”
“That’ll be lovely,” I said. “So nice for the children.”
“Oh my, yes. For me, too.”
“For the lawyers, too?”
“Oh no, they’re very reasonable, they said. Dirt cheap, they said. If we win they get half, but if we don’t win they only get two thousand dollars. We wouldn’t hardly notice two thousand dollars, not out of forty thousand.”
I didn’t point out the flaw in the logic.
So that was what was to become of the forty thousand dollars, the money Mrs. Garr had watched, rocking below in her chair by day, sleeping on the couch in that room at the head of the stairs by night. That was what was to become of the money Mr. Buffingham had killed for twice, and would have killed for again, and for which he had hanged himself in his cell, and for whose lack, his son would take the punishments his crimes had earned.
The lawyers would get half, Mrs. Halloran would get half, and there would probably be stucco on the inside as well as on the outside of Mrs. Garr’s old house.
Just before she left, Mrs. Halloran’s face brightened with the brightness of one who remembers something important.
“Oh, Mrs. Dacres, you remember that five-dollar bill, the tore one, the one you was asking about? The minute I took in the paper Sat’d’y and read about the money and how he confessed and all, I remembered it just like it was happening right then. He give me a bill, and it was tore. It was Mr. Buffingham give me that bill, that’s who it was.”
—
TWO WEEKS FROM THE day I entered the hospital the doctors said I could leave. That, you’ll notice, was a Friday, too.
I still wore the cast, of course. And the left side of my face, where I’d landed, was still a lively purple, with burgundy borders.
Hodge came around in midmorning, to take me home in his car. We drove through residence streets.
“Nice of you to get out of hospitals on
